{"id":1407,"date":"2008-11-21T14:34:35","date_gmt":"2008-11-21T13:34:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mcrrview.web.its.manchester.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=262"},"modified":"2016-01-24T19:55:58","modified_gmt":"2016-01-24T18:55:58","slug":"francis-bacon-tate-britain-till-4-january-2009","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=1407","title":{"rendered":"Francis Bacon, Tate Britain, London"},"content":{"rendered":"

Francis Bacon is presented, in his third Tate Britain retrospective, as a straightforwardly thematic painter: the exhibition\u2019s ten chronologically-arranged rooms consistently refer the viewer to the Cold War, World War 2, the illegality of homosexuality, the decline of organised religion.\u00a0\u00a0Although\u00a0<\/span>Bacon regularly objected to any narrative readings of individual paintings, he becomes here the story of the twentieth century. \u00a0<\/span>It is a stultifying narrative and it represses the strangeness of the paintings, replacing them with a story which could be applied to many of his contemporaries. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The most shocking painting in the exhibition, and one which confounds its narrative, is his wild, luridly expressionist study of Van Gogh, who appears as a conventional figure in a landscape in a painting based on Van Gogh’s ‘The Painter on the Road to Tarascon’ (a painting destroyed in the bombing of Dresden). \u00a0<\/span>Its meshing of colours, its absence of a contrasted overlaid commentary or of cut-up, delineated spaces make it seem more like the work of a contemporary like Sydney Nolan. It is also the show\u2019s one variation on Bacon\u2019s basic, aggressive and confrontational style.<\/p>\n

Elsewhere the exhibition covers familiar ground: the brilliant glaring orange spaces in which his triptychs play out, the way he consistently isolates his \u2018sitters\u2019 on a chair or stool or toilet bowl. Lenin wrote that \u2018the future of aesthetics will be ethics\u2019, but Bacon refuses this dictum, taking the abstract aesthetic patterns of arcs and circles from Kandinsky and Matisse and plastering them with fleshy wounds: the symmetries remain but Bacon’s flashy colours make it hard to look away from his often grotesque subjects. Sometimes Bacon rubs our noses in his aestheticism, but there is sentiment and even pathos in some of the paintings of George Dyer. In one, he cycles a bike, his face a mask as the wheel wobbles away from its skeletal frame. But Bacon explodes this mildly comical scene by \u00a0sprouting from his head, in a whirl of pinks,\u00a0a calm all-seeing\u00a0eye, granting his subject a vantage point for once.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Bacon\u2019s interest in TS Eliot\u2019s early satires and in Aeschylus\u2019s Furies is documented in the notes to the paintings, but their regular focus on a single orifice may have another, more contemporary literary source. The early work\u2019s insistence on the mouth as its central still and clarifying image responds to WH Auden\u2019s definition of his<\/em> art as \u2018a way of happening, a mouth\u2019. In the later work, the mouth is displaced by meaty, bacony<\/em> twists of flesh and by the bright red arrows he aimed at his subjects. The most impressive of these familiar paintings are the triptychs for, again, George Dyer whose crude shadows and spilled flesh act as a powerful elegy for Bacon\u2019s partner.<\/p>\n

The show has its moments but does not add much, or detract from, Bacon’s reputation. It isalso \u00a0disappointingly silent on Bacon\u2019s artistic context and future. It does include a room devoted to Eadweard Muybridge\u2019s early photographs, but Bacon\u2019s kinetic manipulation and juxtaposition of these sequential frames is a well-known story.\u00a0 <\/span>Maybe Bacon\u2019s work is <\/em>too narrow and limited, but there are signs here that he could be usefully seen in the swim of the art of his time, in relation to the abstract painters whose work he professed to loathe, to David Hockney’s post-photographic work, or to the collage which his Britart successors use to follow his example in shocking their public.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Francis Bacon is presented, in his third Tate Britain retrospective, as a straightforwardly thematic painter: the exhibition\u2019s ten chronologically-arranged rooms consistently refer the viewer to the Cold War, World War 2, the illegality of homosexuality, the decline of organised religion.\u00a0\u00a0Although\u00a0Bacon regularly objected to any narrative readings of individual paintings, he becomes here the story of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[12,283],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\nFrancis Bacon, Tate Britain, London - The Manchester Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=1407\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Francis Bacon, Tate Britain, London - The Manchester Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Francis Bacon is presented, in his third Tate Britain retrospective, as a straightforwardly thematic painter: the exhibition\u2019s ten chronologically-arranged rooms consistently refer the viewer to the Cold War, World War 2, the illegality of homosexuality, the decline of organised religion.\u00a0\u00a0Although\u00a0Bacon regularly objected to any narrative readings of individual paintings, he becomes here the story of […]\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=1407\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Manchester Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2008-11-21T13:34:35+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2016-01-24T18:55:58+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"John McAuliffe\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"John McAuliffe\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"3 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=1407\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=1407\",\"name\":\"Francis Bacon, Tate Britain, London - The Manchester Review\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/#website\"},\"datePublished\":\"2008-11-21T13:34:35+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2016-01-24T18:55:58+00:00\",\"author\":{\"@id\":\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/#\/schema\/person\/2ae6b03495b0f875dd9fa5cdaaac13dc\"},\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=1407#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=1407\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=1407#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"Francis Bacon, Tate Britain, London\"}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/#website\",\"url\":\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/\",\"name\":\"The Manchester Review\",\"description\":\"The Manchester Review\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":{\"@type\":\"EntryPoint\",\"urlTemplate\":\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?s={search_term_string}\"},\"query-input\":\"required name=search_term_string\"}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"@id\":\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/#\/schema\/person\/2ae6b03495b0f875dd9fa5cdaaac13dc\",\"name\":\"John McAuliffe\",\"image\":{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/wp-includes\/images\/blank.gif\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/wp-includes\/images\/blank.gif\",\"caption\":\"John McAuliffe\"},\"description\":\"John McAuliffe co-founded the Centre for New Writing at The University of Manchester in 2007. 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